ANTILOG_30Sep26a

“Historiotheque Series #001”. Acrylic painting on canvas (6 in by 12 in) by A.G. (c) 2026. All Rights Reserved.

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ANTILOG_30Sep26a

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- The following pertains to the first painting I made yesterday in a new series called Historiotheque Series which is an attempt to answer the question: What does a Historiotheque-Painting" look like in the 21st century?;
- A little over a decade ago, I wrote a primitive Python script to help me take Laboratory Notes for my experiments in painting, in my art studio; I had always made logs, taken notes, in my painting practice; all I did with the Python script was make it a little more formal;
- Earlier today, I used machine intelligence to assist me in improving both the structure of the actual Laboratory Notes as well as optimize the Python script itself; the image above is what the painting looks like right now and the notes below document the process, using said Python script;
- I may post the actual script itself at a later date; for now, I just want to log the "labnotes"; at the end of this post, I am publishing the feedback that I asked the machine intelligence to give me about how good my labotes actually were and if we needed to change anything about the structure of the notes themselves; Please enjoy!;
- More to come...

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LABORATORY NOTES:

Time: Wed Sep 30 04:13:56 2026

Experiment: HISTORIOTHEQUE SERIES #001

Hypothesis / Objective:

The concept for this series is to take the "History-Painting" form that I created 25 years ago for my project called The History-Project and reinvent it. The question is: What would my History-Painting look like 25 years later? Essentially, it is asking: What is a "Historiotheque-Painting"?

Tooling / Materials:

6 in x 12 inch canvas  (Artist Canvas, Standard 3/4, 100% cotton, Appolon Gotrick), pencil (4B, Mars Lumograph, STAEDTLER), acrylic paint (DecoArt Americana: Lamp Ebony Black, White Pearl Metallic, Almondine), masking tape (Scotch #2020 Contractor Grade Masking Tape)

Procedure:

1. I created a grid pattern/structure in pencil directly on the canvas.

2. I applied masking tape to the canvas first in a vertical orientation to isolate the sections between the penciled lines to create "axes" in the grid pattern to later be painted in black. There were only 2 axes about 2 inches apart centered in the middle of the canvas.

3. I let the paint dry and removed the masking tape (I also took photographs of the whole process at each timestep).

4. I repeated the same process with the masking tape except in a horizontal orientation for the pencil lines for those "axes".

5. I painted the sections delimited by the masking tape, in black.

6. I let the acrylic paint dry one more time (as stated previously, I photographed the painting once again).

7. I created an acrylic wash, adding water by dipping the brush in water and spraying it on the palette by "throwing" the water with a quick thrust of the wrist.

8. I added the wash (water + White Pearl Metallic/Almondine acrylic paint) to the whole surface of the canvas.

9. I let the wash dry and took another photograph.

Results:

The result is quite impressive. The wash had the perfect mix of water and acrylic paint, not too thick and not too thin either. The transparent acrylic wash let the black lines show through (slightly less than 1 in thick). The overall effects looks very much like my "History-Paintings" circa 2001-2004 which I invented for The History-Project painting series whose premise was to attempt to "paint the concept(s) of History". In this case, the premise was "to paint the concept(s) of The Historiotheque", the name I give my art studio/research lab.

Failure Modes:

I accidentally painted almost double the number of thick lines in black in the horizontal direction. Also, the pencil lines are visible, which was an unexpected result. Also, I said in the above (procedure/numbered steps) that the wash was the perfect viscosity but in the end, upon reflection, it was perhaps a little too thick.

Notes:

The Historiotheque painting series is looking amazing thus far, at least for this first instalment. I am going to wait before moving onto the next step and will be working on 2 separate canvases in the meantime, as I take the time to let the painting "breathe". I must always remember to let it sit for a while, observing it as it changes in appearance with the changing of the light throughout the day. My studio has bright LED lights on the ceiling which are much better to work with than normal, everyday incandescent light bulbs, which give more of a yellowy hue to the canvas. It's important for me to have good lighting, otherwise I can't even know what the actual colors are I am mixing and putting on the canvas. In passing, this "labnote" is the first I am writing using a Python script I just wrote that prompts me for the different sections, to fill them in one by one. I will need to edit the text to fix possible typos and something I forgot to add to the tooling/materials section, namely the masking tape (Edit: I added it to the Tooling/Materials section after the fact). I will be posting this labnote onto my Antilog blog where I posted all my similar labnotes in the 2015-2016 period, using an older version of the same Python script, but that had different sections, namely Time (automatic timestamp when running the script), Experiment, Statement of Purpose, Procedure, and Notes. This painting is unfinished for the time being until further notice. As stated, I will observe it for a while before deciding if it needs any further work done on it. I am thinking of adding more pencil, but in HB this time, possibly some straight lines across the canvas in different directions, made with a ruler to ensure the lines are straight. I may also add oil pastel, it's undecided at the moment. I will also photograph the painting at every timestep so that I can properly document the process most likely on my Antilog blog as an entry possibly standing on its own. The painting, also, is part of a new series, so I will be working on the Historiotheque Series over the next little while, working out the exact concept of the series as well. Also, something I forgot to write in the step-by-step procedure: I make "scratch marks" or "hashmarks" in all directions with a palette knife while the wash was drying. The was as well ended up being a light creamed color with a slight metallic touch, as White Pearl acrylic was the metallic kind. The mix was roughly from 75% to 90% White Pearl and from 10% to 25% Almondine. I didn't think to make a more precise measurement, same thing with the amount of water I diluted the acrylic paint with.

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MACHINE INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS OF LABORATORY NOTES:

This is a strong first entry in the new format — the four-field split is doing its job. Here's what I'd change, field by field, all of them small writing habits rather than schema changes:

Experiment — Good as is. The title + serial habit is intact.

Hypothesis / Objective — Good. "What would my History-Painting look like 25 years later?" is a proper question; keep stating it as a question whenever you can, it's the most reproducible form.

Tooling / Materials — Your most thorough field, and two things to fix:

• The masking tape is already in the list — you wrote in Notes that you forgot it, but it's right there ("Scotch #2020 Contractor Grade"). No edit needed; just flagging so you don't add it twice.

• Four things you used are missing: the camera (you photographed every timestep — documentation tooling belongs here), the palette knife (scratch marks while the wash dried), the brush you used for the wash, and water as a diluent. Rule of thumb: if your hands touched it, it goes in this field.

• Put your mixtures here too: the wash ratio (75–90% White Pearl / 10–25% Almondine) currently lives in Notes. A mixture is a material — record it where the materials live, even as a rough ratio jotted while mixing.

Procedure — The important fixes are all here:

• The palette-knife scratch marks are missing. They happened between steps 8 and 9 and currently only exist in Notes. Anything you did belongs in Procedure.

• Check your own sequencing. Step 2 tapes the vertical axes, step 3 dries/removes tape, step 4 tapes horizontally, step 5 paints the black sections — but the vertical axes were un-taped before any black paint appears in the record. Either a painting step is missing or the order is off. A 60-second re-read of your own steps, asking "could someone else follow this?", catches exactly this. It's the single highest-value habit for reproducibility.

• Collapse the photography parentheticals. Steps 3 and 6 both say "(I photographed...)". Replace with one standing line at the top or bottom: "Photographed the canvas after every step." Even better: add the photo filenames or folder — the photos are data, and the note should point at them.

• One action per step, verb first. Step 7's water-throwing description is vivid but three lines long; "Mixed wash: water + White Pearl Metallic/Almondine" says the same thing.

• Approximate durations. "Let the paint dry" — how long? ~30 minutes, overnight, two hours? Even a rough duration turns a diary into a reproducible record.

Results — Solid observational writing. One discipline to add: when reflection revises an observation, leave the original standing and add the revision. You wrote the wash was "the perfect mix" here and "perhaps a little too thick" in Failure Modes — that's honest and fine, but make the relationship explicit ("on reflection: slightly too thick — see Failure Modes"). The delta between first judgment and second thought is data; never overwrite it.

Failure Modes — Excellent content, and it's already doing the work this field exists for. One addition: give each failure a one-line correction — "double horizontal lines → count axes before painting next time; visible pencil → erase or seal before washing; wash too thick → measure the water." Failure + correction is what turns this field into tomorrow's checklist item.

Notes — Rich, but it's carrying overflow. Apply the routing test while writing: did I do this, observe this, or think this? Scratch marks → Procedure. Wash ratio → Tooling. Future plans (HB pencil, ruler lines, oil pastel), the Antilog posting plan, the lighting reflection — those are all correctly here; that's what Notes is for. And end Notes with a one-line status: "UNFINISHED — observing before deciding on further work." Cheap, and it makes the entry's state legible months later.

Two last things: run a 60-second read-back for typos before saving ("not too think", "labnot", "meantim" — you already planned this, just formalize it as the last step). And the whole entry took you real effort — if the laboriousness is the friction, the fix isn't a simpler script, it's these routing habits: each sentence written once, in the field where it belongs, instead of written in Notes and refiled later.

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(*Editor note: I corrected the typos that the machine intelligence analysis pointed out and also added an "edit" in the Failure Modes section saying that I added the masking tape to the Tooling/Materials section. I will be using this format for as many of my new creations as possible going forward. I also will try not to edit them too much, as I want to log and document the process in raw form. Redaction alters or forges the actual RECORD.  Instead, I will make corrections before posting the complete labnotes.)

A.G. (c) 2026. All Rights Reserved.

ANTILOG_24Sep26a

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ANTILOG_24Sep26a

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2026-09-25 08:16:26

- A lot has happened since my last Antilog post, even though it was just 5 days ago; I've been doing a great deal of research and also a great deal of organization of my whole art-research practice; I created a new GitHub Organization for my art studio, The Historiotheque; I have been busy laying the foundation for how I plan to use GitHub repositories to basically run my whole operation from the command line;
- I also spent a lot of time trying to set everything up online so that I can have a maximum of what I call verifiability in my research; what that means concretely is that I publish repositories on my Organization on GitHub and then get Digital Object Identifiers or DOIs on Zenodo for said repositories; then I link those projects to my ORCID ID profile; this "loop" helps link my identity to my work, something that is hard to do at times when you're an independent researcher; at least, it's something that one never really learns as an independent researcher, or something that one doesn't even know exists;
- There's a whole methodology to this form of verifiability, and I have been setting it up as best I can, using agentic AI to help with the management and coordination of everything it entails; I have been working long hours, but it's going to pay off in the end;
- The abstract digital painting you are seeing at the top of this post is a new creation from late last night called "OPERATIVE HISTORIOGRAPHY: SEED NOISE", which is meant to have the look & feel partly of a digtal collage; it was also a bit of a homage to Cubism, after spending days going over my Cubism Studies research from the 2001-2004 period when I lived in the NDF borough in Montreal, Quebec; I will be making many more of these kinds of digital paintings;
- I have modified my social media strategy also; I've decided to make Bluesky my main hub; I'm still publishing on all the other platforms, but am breaking it down differently than what I've been doing for many years; I am posting everything I do in The Historiotheque on my Bluesky account, the new repositories I create for my GitHub Organization, my studio logs I am calling them now;
- My studio logs are all being published directly to the main Historiotheque repository; if I'm still writing these Antilogs, it's that I find the studio logs, while they are being written in a comprehensive and rigorous manner, are not necessarily enough; I find that for now, at least, I still need to fill in the gaps with these Antilog entries; it will all make sense at some point, for those who may be following me and aren't sure exactly where I'm going with all of this;
- Documentation is never going to be perfect; what I call "logging, documenting, and archiving" is never perfect, as you can't possibly put absolutely everything you do and think and so forth on paper; you need to pick and choose WHAT to write down, WHAT to log and so forth, it can't just be "everything", there is no such thing;
- The main goal for me is to make my experiments reproducible" and also to make it all publicly available to anyone with a web browser and an internet connection; for that, the reproducibility, people need to know exactly what the process was that I went through during my experiments; concretely, for a painting, let's say, they need to know everything I did in a clear, step-by-step procedure; that means what kind of paint I'm using on a given canvas, what colors, what type of paintbrush, what type of canvas, what size, etc.; I'm trying to do this at a great level of granularity, but as I said, it's impossible to document absolutely EVERYTHING and still have time to make the actual art or do the research; that's the trade-off, you do as much documentation as is feasible for someone who also spends a great deal of time actually MAKING STUFF;
- I've been looking at the whole "Docs as Code" paradigm, which I find I have already been doing all this time; also, Literate Programming is something I want to learn more about, also because I think I've been trying to do something similar since I started learning to code in Python 14 years ago; I'm also reading about technical writing, as I find that I need to "up my game" on that, as I like to say;
- I've done a great deal of research lately, writing a lot about Cubism, going over the research on the subject that I did in the past, trying to further my research by focusing precisely on my research questions, am plannning also a literature review of the field, which I already did in 2001-2004, but need to pursue anew, as much has been written since;
- I talked a lot about continuous delivery in the past, how I have been trying to implement something like that in my art-research practice; the thing is, it was more of of the conceptual foundation of what I was trying to do, at least in part; I hadn't built out the theory entirely, and was only actually practicing it at a more or less superficial level; now I'm going to formally study the whole CI/CD process, trying to implement it at a much deeper level;
- That's it for now, it's a short update; I am reviewing the latest Official Declaration and Official Release documents, reviewing progress on the first Prospective document, all an integral part of The New Documentaiton; More to come, stay tuned!

ANTILOG_19Sep26a

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ANTILOG_19Sep26a

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2026-09-19 00:04:04

- It's been over a month since I've written in this Antilog; much has happened since; I wasn't sure if I would talk about personal affairs on this Antilog, but I guess I will say a few things; my father passed away three weeks ago; before that, for about a month or so, he had become very sick; I couldn't really do any art or research because I was taking care of him almost daily; in any case, he ended up being diagnosed with terminal cancer and died 9 days later;
- I am slowly starting to get back into art creation, though on the research front, I've still been doing a good deal of research, though maybe slighly less than before; this happens, anyway, in the summer usually; I have a slower period and then the creative juices start flowing again by the time autumn comes around; it is going to be autumn in a few days and I'm already feeling more creative; granted, my thoughts aren't always as clear as they could be, given that I have just lost someone who was very close to me;
- Above is the latest mixed media painting in my CHRONOTOPIUM SERIES; I numbered it no. 11 in the series, though technically it might be no. 10; anyway, I lost count at some point in my filenames and don't know where I'm at, though it doesn't really matter; these are just "quick-sketches", meant to sketch out basic ideas rapidly; (I counted them again and I do believe this was no. 11 in the series, after all! Sorry for the mishap!);
- In my last entry into this Antilog, I mentioned a new art form I was calling "Archive Art", which ended up becoming the "Archival Arts", though I found mentions of this term online and need to differentiate my concept of it from those pre-existing ones I found; it doesn't really matter what it's called, so long as I have a well-defined, new concept; now, I am thinking of all sorts of new art forms, something for instance that I want to call "disaster art", which also may already exist.

2026-09-19 01:22:12

- I just did a Quick Retrospective of what I call my Refmats which I have generated and collected since my last Antilog entry, from August 7, 2026; something interesting popped out, a manifesto I wrote called "MANIFESTO OF LATENT REALISM", which was my vision of what art should be for the 21st century; it's strange because in it, I talk about "the physical hybridization of synthetic outputs with high-friction mediums—heavy impasto oil, hand-cut collage, organic decay, and analog film"; what is strange about that is that just a few days ago, or maybe a week ago or so, I reset the algorithm on my Instagram account and started looking up collage work;
- I found dozens of accounts of amazing artists doing both digital and analog collage work; I was inspired by what my father was working on before he got sick and passed away; he had been a visual artist for the last 70 years and had a hybrid practice mixing analog and digtal mediums; he had taken a step back from the work he was sharing on the web and started working on a new collage which was going to be a portrait of Frida Kahlo; it's interesting that he chose her as a subject for a portrait done as a collage, since we know how much Frida suffered in her life and how he himself was suffering; it was kind of prophetic also, as though he had a premonition of what was going to transpire; he had collected all of the materials and printed out a large portrait of Frida Kahlo that he made digitally and that he was going to reproduce with actual analog collage; it is kind of in homage to my father's unrealized magnun opus that I am so interested in doing collage work now and possibly for the foreseeable future;
- What is doubly strange, too, is that I had already been doing a series of collages since last July, what I have talked about at length in this Antilog and was called THE CHRONOTOPIUM-SERIES; as I have shown above in the opening image and in the text that follows, I am currently at no. 11 in said series; but it's as though I didn't realize what I was doing until much later; I have worked a great deal on the concept for this series since I started it in July, and now I keep having serendipitous experiences going through the archives or searching for things online; everything always goes full circle with me, with my work; it's why I've written and thought so much about continuous review as well as what I call Hyperreflexive Design; it's all about the hyperreflexivity.

2026-09-19 07:33:54

- As I said, through my father's sudden illness and then death, I was still able to do quite a bit of research on my downtime, though I didn't make very much art; I tried making a few, but I felt I couldn't really post very much online, especially after he died; I felt it would have been precipitous; I also don't know what I'm going to do with my all my social media posting; my dad was also questioning himself about that near the end, whether he would keep posting on Facebook since mostly people weren't engaging very much with his stuff;
- I've been doing the same thing for years; I make art and post it online usually with an accompanying text, at least with the text on Facebook on my personal and professional Facebook pages; the thing is, I was also cross-posting the same content - without the text, just the title - on X, Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn; I recently found out that my posting behavior was probably getting the algorithms on these platforms to penalize me; apparently, they don't like it when you cross-post within the same couple of minutes, usually under a minute, though sometimes my posts might have had different timestamps with a couple of hours difference; also, my posting was very regular, like once a day a lot of the times for many years; I took breaks here and there, some longer than others, but mostly I posted at a very rapid cadence; it does seem like I was being penalized by the algorithms, though, that my posts were not really reaching a whole lot of people; now I'm questioning my use of social media as a whole, wondering if I shouldn't just stop using all of these platforms; I think if I do choose to stop posting online, I will still post on Bluesky because it doesn't have the same kind of algorithms as Facebook et al; we'll see, I'm doing an experiment on Bluesky to see if I can reach people; if it doesn't work, it's quite possible that I just stop posting altogether; I would just post one last thing explaining what's happening, explaining how I just can't invest the time and energy to do something that's a losing battle; the algorithms are penalizing me and my posts are reaching almost no one, so it's kind of a waste of time;
- I was climbing the local mountain yesterday with a close one and we talked about what artists have to do to have success in the art market; at first, he asked me what my basic strategy was or if I had any success on the web; I said no and then we talked about what an artist has to do to have success; I told him about a video I had seen by Albert-László Barabási that talked about success in the arts; he found it interesting; we talked about my father too who was a visual artist all his life and how he maybe didn't want to "play the game", at least not later in life;
- This in part has led me to questioning the role of the artist and of art, and their meaning, for the 21st century; I realized that I actually ended up being one of the very first painters, composers, and authors of the New Millennium; I kind of have a vision of what art could be for the New Millenium and I will continue to try to realize that vision and do everything I can to promote the arts & culture; I'm a big fan of the work UNESCO has done over the years for the arts & culture;
- I also think that we are in danger of losing culture as less and less people actually seem to have any culture to speak of; I know that this may make me seem like a cultural elitist, but what can I say?; people do not seem to exhibit the features or signs of people who have a deep culture or cultural tradition, unless of course you count pop culture, which I do not consider is the same thing as having Culture with a capital C;
- As I have said ten thousand times, I am an interdisciplinary artist-researcher with 30 years of experience; the thing is, I have mostly focused on the art aspect over the years; I have focused a great deal on the research aspect, just not really as much as on the art one; now, I want to focus more on my research; I want to try to publish in academic journals, specifically ones dedicated to art-research in some form or another, or are Open Access or otherwise would accept me publishing even though I don't have the academic background or credentials; I think it would be a good thing if I strove to write actual essays and published them onlie, but also just kept them to myself and tried to publish them in these academic journals, as they usually require your research to not have been published elsewhere;
- So I'm going to start a few new projects in this direction and will keep upping my game on the research front; there is still a lot I need to learn and I might actually try to take some University courses if I can, or at the CEGEP level if I have to, that would help me become a better researcher, like learning all of the methodologies I need to know to be able to truly, as I said, up my research game.
- More to come...

ANTILOG_24July26a

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ANTILOG_24July26a

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2026-07-24 05:41:20

- I recently took home an old external hard drive from someone who was keeping it for me; much to my surprise, there were tons of files I had completely forgotten even existed; I've spent the last several days browsing through the files, copying things onto my computer so I can properly archive them online and on my other main external hard drives;
- It's strange how I made all this music and these video recordings that I kind of remembered making and recording, but which I thought had been lost to history; finding them again has been really amazing; it just goes to show, when you have a process for logging, documenting, and archiving, you eventually reap the rewards; these files come now at precisely a time when I've been really focused on archiving everything; it's kind of a serendipitous discovery, or a series of them;
- I will be publishing things online, on YouTube a great deal, all my old recordings that never made the cut at the time; some of these files go back 20 years to the day; my entire "cam drops" as I used to call them, going back to at least 2007;
- Some of the videos were difficult to watch as I wasn't at my best mentally; but still, I think these archives help me process (my own) history; I was writing a lot about that recently, how we need to process history, how history may be (a) given, but that the processing we need to do with regard to history is not (a) given; in fact, I would argue it is never given; history maybe discloses itself, has its own givenness in this way, but I don't think that means that it has necessarily been processed;
- Something interesting that I found browsing this new digital archive is that I had already been doing something with my digital archives that I now do, earlier than I thought I had begun doing it; back in the day, storage space was expensive and files weighed a lot in terms of their file sizes; the basic idea was to try to use up as little storage space as possible, because files in regard to size were expensive; when storage began becoming much cheaper and we had access to much bigger drives, something fundamental changed in my digital archiving practice: I began archiving all sorts of files and file folders redundantly; what I mean is that I wasn't afraid if a file or even an entire file folder was saved twice on the save external hard drive, in different locations, because digital storage space was cheap; also, it made it much easier to find things, it augmented, I found, the findability of files on external hard drives; now I can navigate through, I can browse through, digital archives and I don't need to necessarily memorize the file structure or structure of the file folders, the directory, and everything; I just navigate/browse through it and the most important files tend to repeat themselves redundantly; in any case, it was over a decade ago that I realized this and also realized the importance of redundancy in an archival practice such as mine;
- In any case, nagivating through/browsing through this newly re-discovered digital archive has been amazing; I've found so much amazing content that I either thought was lost or didn't even remember at all; there are videos of me talking about projects whose concepts I thought I never really explored in any formal way; it turns out I did, I just couldn't recall exactly; all of this will help me continue these old projects, creating brand new works of art as well as original research, and it will help me come up with new projects as well, and new conceptual schemes underlying those future projects.

2026-07-24 17:58:56

- I never really set out to be an "archivist", it just kind of happened; I just liked to keep folders of documents and that tendency just got greater and greater over time until I had a massive personal archive of everything I created; the digital archives too just kind of happened; back in the beginning of 1994, I think it was, I had created many .txt files on a family member's computer and I just ended up saving them onto a diskette which I kept until diskette drives no longer really existed on computers; I had saved them as a CD-ROM, along with other digital documents I had created since then;
- That's how it happened, in any case; I just ran with it, I kept adding to it over time; now, I mostly add to the digital archives, not necessarily to the analog one, except for things I am printing out to read, as well as my paintings; I also recently recuperated a bunch of paintings, a few boxes' worth, which I am going to digitize; it's important for me at this point to keep digitizing my artwork, everything else; I haven't begun actually digitizing notebookes, though it's something I maybe want to start doing; it's just that that's a really labor-intensive job that I wouldn't really enjoy; but the payoff, though, of actually having my physical notebooks digitized is something that might just lead me to actually doing it;
- The image above is something I did a few years ago; I had been making these digital visual designs of what I call "noisefields" or "noise field paintings" which featured a lot of pixelization effects; someone close to me one day suggested that I create an analog version with these actual little wooden cubes; I did so and photographed it and the result is what you see above; I really love this image, and I've made several other ones at the time that I might share at some point;
- I've always been at the intersection of the digital and analog worlds; I still paint actual paintings in acrylic or else mixed media pieces with elements of collage; I also still make ink or pencil drawings; I actually love urban sketching, which I do sometimes; I make all sorts of digital images, though, from digital photographs, often which I process, or else just digitally "native" works in the sense that they start out digital, usually from seed noise which I then modulate or evolve; I also create documents on my desktop but also write in physical notebooks as well as write what I call Refcards which are just reference cards or index cards that I write on; usually, I take notes that I've written in my notebook and transcribe the most salient content by hand onto these index cards; I have created countless Refcards like this which are the backbone of my archival system; I've even created a Python app for my Refcards-System which works wonderfully and is nice and streamlined, I love it!;
- Even though I wilfully began keeping and maintaining a growing archive, I never imagined that I would take on the ROLE of "archivist", or "amateur archivist" if I'm being honest; I never studied archival science so only consider myself an amateur, really; it is a job, however, that takes up a lot of my time; I also stress out over it a good deal, like what happens if I lose my apartment and can't afford to maintain my archive, what will happen to it?; will I just lose 30 years' worth of amazing material?; that's the risk inherent in maintaining an archive, the risk of it disappearing;
- It takes resources; you constantly have to expend energy to keep it organized, to keep it from falling on the wayside as a project; I mean it IS a project, one of my biggest, most large-scale projects; I've been doing it for 30 years or more; my digital archives, as I said, started in January or February of 1994, so it's already been 32 years thus far; how much longer can I keep this going, though?;
- I'm really afraid at times of losing my archives, which I think are really significant because they track the record of a living, mature artist running what I call an Art Operation (a "mature Art Operation", I like to say); the Art Operation concept goes back at least 12 years; 2014 is one of the earliest mentions I find of the Art Operation concept in my digital archives, though I would need to push the search further to see what the actual first instance of it is; I could always look at GitHub commits in my repositories that have to do with the ArtOps concept; I could see what the first commit was, and be able to "reconstruct the timeline", which is a hobby of mine (as seen in my continuous review practice as well as my habit of making Retrospectives; (*I just checked quickly and I think my first commit which mentioned the concept of Art Operations was in a GitHub repository called ArtOperations in a GitHub organization or whatnot called Historiomics; that was on April 14, 2014, so the concept is at least that old; **N.B.: I also seem to have created blogs with artoperation in the URL at least as far back as December, 2014, and also wrote about it to someone via email at roughly the same time; I also created an artoperations Twitter account - now X - in November of that year).

2026-07-24 20:58:14

- A friend and collaborator asked me about my fictional characters earlier; he wanted to know how I came up with them, or something to that effect; I told him (later on via Discord chat) that that was precisely why I came up with the idea for my new series of philosophical sketches I call the Abstract Characterology; I said that it was going to be an important tool in the building of future characters and building out the old ones as well;
- My friend had asked if I had to know everything about my characters, if I had their history in mind, what they liked or disliked, etc.; while I do develop my characters, I have to admit that sometimes I don't know them as well as I should; it's a work-in-progress, many of my characters being decades old in novels I never was able to finish for various reasons;
- For me, it's mostly about their character as well as what "tragic flaw" it is that defines them at their core as fictional characters; that's what the Abstract Characterology is about, I want to define characters as a set of aesthetic problems; my characters are built, in any case, on observations I've made of people and myself in my life, which the characterology will go over, including the design process for novels in general, not only building characters but also "worldbuilding";
- It has to be believable, I have to make my characters believable, which is why many of them are just based on aspects of myself, as I am the human being I have studied the most and know myself really well, which can only help with the realism; I've studied other people also a great deal, but not as much as I've contemplated myself, my thoughts, emotions, needs, personality, etc.;
- I was looking for software earlier that could help me with my novel-writing process, apps that maybe could help me finish the dozens of novels I have started but never finished; as I searched far and wide for a solution, I came across a text about a method that they author found helped them the most; in it, they said something which necessarily made me think of my new repository on Design Concepts for Novelistic Phenomenologies; it said:

Good fiction doesn’t just happen, it is designed.
(Ref. The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel)

- I got on this subject as well because of the image featured directly above this block of text which is a portrait I made several years ago of Émile Zola; this connects to my novels because of an important essay he wrote called The Experimental Novel; the essay, which I believe it was first published in 1880, outlines Zola's new theory of novel-writing, the experimental novel was based on the scientific principles from Claude Bernard's 1865 work called An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine; Bernard's work essentially established the scientific method for modern medicine and introduced the concept of internal body environment or milieu intérieur; in any case, Émile Zola wrote about this new concept of experimental novel, but I don't find that his novels are really what I would consider all that experimental; sure, his method was especially experimental if you contrasted it to what was being written before Zola in terms of novels;
- Perhaps this is due to my privileged position as being born long after the 19th century, but I believe that the novels of William S. Burroughs are true experimental novels in that they were actual physical experiments with writing, using his cut-up technique or method, which he is famous for;
- My art is also experimental, but much closer to Burroughs than Zola, which I guess is natural given the era in which I have created my work; it remains true, though, as I believe I have mentioned here before, that there are flaws in my novel-writing system, in my novelistic phenomenology or novel-as-a-system; I keep just designing and designing stories, the novel itself, I start new documents, I write for a while, but I keep coming face to face with the same problem: the scale and scope of my novels are too big; the scale and scope are too big but also I spend too much time ideating and not enough time just writing; this is what the author of the article I cited above calls composting (the author is Randy Ingermanson, Ph.D.):

If you’re like most people, you spend a long time thinking about your novel before you ever start writing. You may do some research. You daydream about how the story’s going to work. You brainstorm. You start hearing the voices of different characters. You think about what the book’s about — the Deep Theme. This is an essential part of every book which I call “composting”. It’s an informal process and every writer does it differently.
(Ref. The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel)

-  I did end up finding at least two apps that could be very useful in writing my current and future novels, and potentially finishing my old ones; the app I am considering the most is called MyStory.today and seems to be a complete environment for novel-writing; the paid version is pretty cheap and has all sorts of added bells & whistles that I find would be useful; it would still be much better than the way I write novels now, which funny enough consists of mostly not writing them; as I said above, I'm stuck in the ideation phase;
- In any event, I love thinking of writing novels as a design problem; characters are design problems, fictional worlds are a design problem, the story, the dialogue, everything is a design problem; these problems, which I usually refer to as aesthetic problems, require you to write a problem statement; you can't really have a problem like this and not at least think of a problem statement, which can take many forms; you have to think about it, though, what the citation above calls "composting";
- Suffice to say that I really want to write this new novel, The Chronotopium, and will use all the tools necessary to do so; I realized that The Chronotopium, as I have designed it thus far in my mind, basically has no conflict, tension, or friction; that is to say, in the fictional universe the novel takes place in, everything is in perfect synchrony; it is a temporal utopia and in that regard would technically fall into the genre of utopian literature or fiction; the thing is, a novel or any story without tension, without conflict and whatnot, would not really make for a great reading experience; one has to give something for the reader to chew on, if you will; I am currently figuring out what that might look like, how I can add elements of tension in the novel itself;
- The actual writing of the novel-as-text, as textual object, will create its own kind of dramatic tension in that it will be pretty fragmented; that's at least how I've been designing this and other novels, as being made up of fragments, because that's how I always wrote novels in the past; having design concepts for novels that were too big in scale and in scope, I ended up with dozens of different documents that were all attempts at writing the novel, but which failed; as I just said, I ended up a bunch of fragments and the only actual text of my novels were literary collages or composites, if you will, of all those disparate parts; what is interesting in that regard is that the novel itself can take on an indefinite number of forms; that is to say, the separate fragments or pieces can be arranged and rearranged in an indefinite number of ways; the novel, then, is a mutable object; maybe not once it's published, but you know what I mean; it's not written in stone;
- In any event, I think maybe I haven't thought long and hard enough about the design problems/aesthetic problems of my novels, their fictional worlds, places, characters, etc.; it will be interesting to see how the Abstract Characterology develops; I came up with the concept of a book called Esquisses caractérielles or Characterological Sketches in 2007 or thereabouts, but never ended up writing much of anything in the document I had created for it; I can move very slow at times in my art practice; some projects take 20 or more years to even begin to make headway; often I don't even really know what a new project is about until 10-20 years have passed sometimes; I have an intuition about it, though; they are usually based on what I call artistic visions;
- The artistic vision is not like a mystical or religious vision; it is not a theophany, but what I call a historiophany.

- Talking about characters, the mixed media painting above is a portrait of an important character in my early novelistic writings called MAUD or "M.O.D.", a.k.a. "Mother of Dreams"; MAUD came to me as an apparition in a dream when I was in my late teens; she later became a critical part of my novels, starting actually in my Exhibition in Tonal Cinema novellas, and later in the work I did on The History-Project novel; that's why I need to write my Abstract Characterology, because characters like MAUD to me are almost like real beings, real entities; I see them in my conscious mind, fully formed, almost with a mind of their own; I want to write about these characters as they exist in the Author's mind, including a phenomenology of this process in the actual novel as metafiction; the Author inserts himself into the novel; it's an old literary trope that I quite enjoy; the risk of too much metafiction, though, is that your book is largely unreadable; the novel as I keep repeating, has its own aesthetic problem that it is trying to find elegant solutions for, but it shouldn't have to be a massive puzzle that requires all that extra work by readers to even begin unraveling; I believe in showing, not telling through the story; it should be clear, though, where I'm going at every step of the way, while also maintaining a correct dramatic tension;
- As I may or may not have mentioned already, part of the story of The Chronotopium is the characters from previous novels in this series starting to build a system I call Archivillus, which is a personification of the Archive, but also a system that essentially contains every single error or failure or conflict or whatnot from the entirety of human history; it is essentially a massive database of all of these errors, containing as well the many design solutions to said errors; people use Archivillus to solve problems and they - and the machine intelligence - get so good at it that eventually there are no more conflicts or tensions, or any friction, in human life, and so we get the perfect synchrony and other qualities of The Chronotopium; what I was thinking of doing to add dramatic tension was have the Archivillus system simulate a person, like an Outsider Persona if you will, who plays the role of the Skeptical Visitor, with a native citizen of The Chronotopium acting as the Guide, similar to how classical utopias often featured an outsider who arrives in the ideal society and is given a guided tour by an idealized citizen, i.e. Raphael Hythloday in More's Utopia; that way, I could create the necessary tension by telling the story of the Outsider and the Guide; it's just one idea amongst many;
- In any case, that's it for now; I will come back to the subjects of this antilog in future iterations; as I always say, it's a work-in-progress; I will be lucky if I finish even one-tenth of the novels and other projects I want to finish in my lifetime, and even that is being generous; I needed to personify the Archive, though, in the character/system of Archivillus, and I need the Abstract Characterology to explain once and for all, and for future reference, how I come up with fictional characters, also how these characters function in my mind, phenomenologically in the lived experience of writing novels; as for the work I'm doing in my digital archives that I opened this antilog with, the archiving process continues and will continue into the future, as the archival work is an essential part of my interdisciplinary art-research practice; every day I come face to face with the archives; every day I do retrospectives on my work leading up to the present moment; it too is a work-in-progress; one can't possibly log and document - and archive by implication - everything; one must choose what to include, and choose wisely; that much I know is true, that you can't capture everything; it's just not possible; you capture only a fraction of the work, and the rest is essentially "lost to history"; but you can log, document, and archive within the "feasible region", if you will, and come up with "feasible solutions", but never a complete solutions; we're not aiming for the absolute best or optimal choice, but something "good enough", in a process you might call "satisficing"; the archival process is also experimental like my art, and usual satisficing is as good a cognitive heuristic as I can hope for; everything is an experiment, is experimental; that's all for now.

ANTILOG_01July26a

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ANTILOG_01July26a

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2026-07-01 06:30

- I just ran a new experiment for my old project from over a decade ago called the "WHITE POINT PROJECT", which I have written a good deal about in this antilog; I took a photograph of my wall, then added a box on the right side where I incuded two hues that I sampled from it that I considered to be the two main colors I could see with my eye, in said image; I then wrote a text called "ÉTUDE ON ATMOSPHERICS OF THE INTERIOR", where I go into more details on the specifics of the experiment and how it connects to my "WHITE POINT PROJECT", whose objective is to try to get people to start to observe and notice subtle changes in the colors of surfaces in interior settings in order, I hope, to deepen their appreciation of the poetic quality of these ambient spaces they inhabit; here are the labnotes I just took after running the experiment and posting all of it online; I keep the labnotes on my antilog because I don't think they are necessarily all that interesting for the average person; the text I shared, alongside the picture, is all anyone really needs to know; here are the labnotes:

2026-07-01 12:54

- I ended up making another field recording of Atmospheric Tone, turning it into a video, publishing it on YouTube, and sharing it on all my social media sites, or most of them; I am going to try to keep making these semi-regularly; I think it's an important addition to my daily practice; I know that most people won't "get" it, but if I only produced art and research that people "get", I wouldn't be very prolific;
- I also just recorded another video discourse and published it again on YouTube; it is called "THE LUMINOUS HISTORIOTOPE: THE UNIVERSE AS SELF-INSCRIBING CANVAS"; I presented it as either a neo- or a post-Einsteinian vision or revolution; the idea was to take my new Atmospherics Theory and present it as "earth-shattering", as much as Einstein's theories changed the way the world viewed the universe and everything in it; it was meant to be similar to Immanuel Kant's Copernican revolution;
- Last weekend, I was at the Abbaye Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, spending my days in silence and solitude; I had many powerful experiences that continue several days after I left the Abbaye and I predict will continue to inhabit me, shaping the direction of the next several months and even years;
- I now have a much better design concept for my new novel, The Chronotopium; I wrote the following abstract if you will the other day as part of the process of really developing the design concept for the novel:

The novel is called "THE CHRONOTOPIUM: A STORY OF ALGORITHMOGENESIS" and has to do with our civilization in the future where civilization is backed up and built upon a massive, planet-wide computer system called ARCHIVILLUS, which is basically the personification of a massive distributed database which holds the "complete human archive" going back to pre-hominid times, an archive that contains all of the errors and failures and whatnot, conflicts, historiopathies and the rest, that have ever occurred on planet earth, on what is called "The Historiosphere". It is used to ensure that "The Chronotopium" continues to run smoothly. Why it's called The Chronotopium is that there are really no more conflicts among humans, they are running perfectly smoothly, everything is in perfect order and perfectly synchronized. They are more like an "eusocial species" like ants or whatnot. Everything is governed by the laws of sacred geometry, and it is a "temporal utopia" if you will, where all "chronosystems" are perfectly aligned and in sync. Why it's a story or book of "Algorithmogenesis" is that long before the current status of the world founded on the ARCHIVILLUS SYSTEM and running in perfect synchrony everywhere all the time, humans began to change fundamentally as a species. They began becoming more and more engaged in procedural generation, in the use of machine intelligence for everything. Unbeknownst to them, they were in the process of becoming what we call "algorithmic beings". Algorithmic being presents itself to society as a kind of "global historiophany" and the process just accelerates from that point on. There are no unclean spirits, no contamination of the mind, no one has any trauma, there is no intergenerational trauma left, everything is clean, and the action in the novel runs as smoothly as ARCHIVILLUS in keeping everything perfectly in check.

- And here is the video I mentioned above, "THE LUMINOUS HISTORIOTOPE: THE UNIVERSE AS SELF-INSCRIBING CANVAS"; I will get into the conceptual framework I am using for this, which is all part of a new project called "THE CHRONOTOPIUM", which includes a novel by the same name that I've been working on full-time at this point after my very inspiring trip to the Abbaye Saint-Benoit-du-Lac:

2026-07-01 14:51

- I kind of had an interruption, or I wouldn't call it that exactly, call it inspiration; I ended up making some other videos, two of them, the first being a video of me taking apart a cardboard box while reflecting on The History-Project which I actually started almost 25 years ago; the second video is of me actually doing the first pass as I call it, on a new painting in a new painting series for THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT, as I am now calling it; essentially, it's what I call a "history-machine"; before I get further into that, though, I want to share with you the Atmospheric Tone field recording I made earlier this morning, just for the record/for future reference:

2026-07-01 16:14

- In passing, I just realized that at least one group of artists already used the name Chronotopium for one of their projects; since they can't copyright the term, since it is essentially the term Chronotope just with a different ending, and they can't copyright Chronotope, I am taking the liberty to keep using the name for my new novel and the new project which houses that novel; if ever there are copyright issues, I will just change it to THE CHRONOTOPE-PROJECT and then no one can ever say anything, since that's a term used in the work of Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin; I may just switch it to that anyway just in case;
- In any case, I just recorded a few other videos as I was saying and now they are online; here is the first, called "OVERTURE TO THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT":

- The video I just posted above is just me taking a cardboard box apart and talking about my interdisciplinary art-research project, The History-Project, which I started almost exactly 25 years ago; I go into some details on the process that led to the project, where I had just moved to the NDG borough of Montreal, Quebec, and needed to keep painting not to lose what I call operational continuity; I needed canvases so I took apart the boxes I had just moved into our new place and painted on the cardboard; I have been told many times that I shouldn't paint on cardboard because my paintings are valueless, because cardboard is valueless; I think I painted almost solely on cardboard after I was first told that; you can't force me to do anything, the more you try, the more I will do the opposite; here is the second video in this series, this time, on "THE BIRTH OF THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT SERIES" where I do an actual demonstration of how I work on my mixed media pieces with collage elements nowadays; what I find hilarious, hilarious to me anyway, is that all these artists nowadays are making videos of themselves painting or else showing the inside of their massive, luxurious art studios and I'm making these shitty little videos in my kitchen taking apart cardboard boxes and painting on "valueless cardboard"; I'll show them; this is how you create original art, isolated from the universe, in what I like to call "a crucible of hellfire":

- And here is the first official painting of THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT SERIES; I may just keep it at this for today's antilog; I could go into much finer detail on everything that I did today, everything that transpired in The Historiotheque and outside it too; I just want to keep it short and sweet for today, and anyway it's already been quite long; I'm still just getting acclimated again to life outside the Abbaye; I have a lot of work to do, lots of writing, I have an incredible amount of reading to do, reading too; so many books to read, things to write, and now an entirely new series of paintings to paint;
- I was already working on a new series of paintings, mostly portraits, before I took my weekend trip this weekend; I will be continuing those too; that project was called "ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM" and had a lot to do with the work of Walter Benjamin, his Arcades Project as well as his writings on Surrealism; also I was just going over works by modernist authors as well, and painters, where I took up my Cubism studies after an almost 25-year hiatus, as I was saying above; that series can run concurrently with this new series; the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM I guess is a subproject of THE CHRONOTOPIUM-PROJECT, part of the research that is going into it, that is going to be the foundation it's founded on; the ANATOMY OF AN AESTHETIC PROBLLEM also includes a lot of music I need to write for piano, organ, and orchestra; more on that soon, as I will be making some ambient, experimental sound design, possibly tonight, but in the coming weeks, and recording more and more pieces of piano and organ for my Seasons of The Heart Project; to conclude at least for now, if not for today, here is the first official CHRONOTOPE-PAINTING; much will need to be written on the subject, and I think for now at least I will call it THE CHRONOTOPE-PROJECT and only mention the actual Chronotopium in the novel itself, which is fictional, so no one can stop me from using any term I want in a fictional novel: